Corporations claim that DRM is necessary to fight copyright infringement online and keep consumers safe from viruses. But there's no evidence that DRM helps fight either of those. Instead DRM helps big business stifle innovation and competition by making it easy to quash "unauthorized" uses of media and technology.

DRM has proliferated thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA), which sought to outlaw any attempt to bypass DRM.

Fans shouldn't be treated like criminals, and companies shouldn't get an automatic veto over user choice and innovation. EFF has led the effort to free the iPhone and other smartphones, is working to uncover and explain the restrictions around new hardware and software, has fought for the right to make copies of DVDs, and sued Sony-BMG for their "rootkit" CD copy-protection scheme. Learn more about our efforts through the links below.

Since the invention of the remote control, rightsholders and audience have fought a war over ads. The market for tools to skip, mask or mute ads holds publishers and marketers to account: they know that if their ads get too obnoxious, their audiences will be motivated to make them disappear...

The Supreme Court says that copyright requires "escape valves" like fair use to comply with the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of expression. Fair use -- and its non-US cousin, Fair Dealing -- allows people to make new works from copyrighted materials without permission, especially when it comes to political...

Savvy parents know that every cloud-connected electronic gadget they buy for their kids is a potential hole in their network, a sneaky listening device that hangs around some of the most sensitive and personal moments of you kids' lives and the lives of your whole family. But tomorrow's smart parents...

Visit The Catalog of Missing Devices, a collection of tools, services, and products that could have been, but never were, because of DRM. For the most part, rightsholders don't object to user-created subtitling, which is key to making videos available to non-native speakers of the media's original language, and...

Every three years, EFF's lawyers spend weeks huddling in their offices, composing carefully worded pleas we hope will persuade the Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress to grant Americans a modest, temporary permission to use our own property in ways that are already legal.
Yeah, we think that's weird...